OlegTheBatty wrote: Written records are recent - 9k years tops. Anyone who observed anything before that forgot to write it down, I guess.

No but ape physiology hasn't changed.

There is no written record of apes innately drinking cyanide either, but we sort of know that didn't happen. Have you worked out how we know this? Homeopathy isn't innate is it?

OlegTheBatty wrote:So what? The fact that using psychoactive herbs is detrimental to survival skills is irrelevant if the herbs were used when not practicing survival skills.

So the apes were gathering magic mushrooms, that don't exist in the savannah, in totally different foraging expeditions to their normal survival foraging trips and this was innate, although magic mushrooms were simultaneously detrimental to those same foraging skills? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Mckenna left an important conclusion out of the paper he quoted "Thus it would be detrimental to the species". I will find the original paper and quote for you, if asked.

OlegTheBatty wrote:I'm not arguing in favor of McKenna, which is utter nonsense; I am arguing your sloppy debunking.

I know that Oleg and I respect you doing this. It forces me to really really think what I'm saying and that's a good thing.

[color=#000080]My dilemma is that that when I argue using full terminology and carefully composed scientific sentences, I get Zeuzz responding. When I try keep things simple and easy to follow, I get you responding.

Part of the problem is that you are focusing too much on minutia. Sure, McKenna posited magic mushrooms, but that is only one source of psychoactive drugs. There are many others. The actual source is not important at this stage.

Once it is established that the use of psychoactive drugs caused the evolution of a larger brain, then we can investigate the question of what the source was. Since we will never get to that point, the question of source is irrelevant.

To put it another way, the magic mushroom question merely attacks a minor detail, it does not attack the primary hypothesis.

Therefore, I really should not take any shortcuts.

You've been spending so much time debating bottomfeeders, you're losing your touch. A major leaguer does not hone his skills in the bush leagues.

. . . with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own because he has commented on the idea of another . . . - Alexandre Dumas 'The Count of Monte Cristo"

There is no statement so absurd that it has not been uttered by some philosopher. - Cicero

OlegTheBatty wrote: Written records are recent - 9k years tops. Anyone who observed anything before that forgot to write it down, I guess.

No but ape physiology hasn't changed.

There is no written record of apes innately drinking cyanide either, but we sort of know that didn't happen. Have you worked out how we know this? Homeopathy isn't innate is it?

Modern apes are not in the evolutionary path to humans, so any lack of innate tendencies is irrelevant. The use of psychoactives is common in human cultures, including some that remained isolated from Eurasian influences until recently. That is evidence for an innate tendency. It does not require 100% of the population to possess the tendency for it to be a form of gene expression. Even a small percentage would suffice. The genome is complex, and varies.

Are you suggesting that because some people have blue eyes and some have brown eyes that eye color is a learned characteristic?

OlegTheBatty wrote:So what? The fact that using psychoactive herbs is detrimental to survival skills is irrelevant if the herbs were used when not practicing survival skills.

So the apes were gathering magic mushrooms, that don't exist in the savannah, in totally different foraging expeditions to their normal survival foraging trips and this was innate, although magic mushrooms were simultaneously detrimental to those same foraging skills? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Mckenna left an important conclusion out of the paper he quoted "Thus it would be detrimental to the species". I will find the original paper and quote for you, if asked.

The protohumans in question were wandering about foraging for roots and berries, and scavenging carcasses. Why would they need a 'special foraging expedition'?

. . . with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own because he has commented on the idea of another . . . - Alexandre Dumas 'The Count of Monte Cristo"

There is no statement so absurd that it has not been uttered by some philosopher. - Cicero

OlegTheBatty wrote: Why would they need a 'special foraging expedition'?

Because magic mushrooms don't grow in the African savanna, as I already said.

Matthew Ellard wrote:

OlegTheBatty wrote: Modern apes are not in the evolutionary path to humans, so any lack of innate tendencies is irrelevant.

So why are you making a hypothesis for something that has never been observed?

If no ape does it. No evidence exists that a hominid did it and if a hominid actually did do it, it would be detrimental to that hominid, .......then what are we even talking about?

OlegTheBatty wrote: The use of psychoactives is common in human cultures, including some that remained isolated from Eurasian influences until recently.

That's because there are magic mushrooms there. There are no magic mushrooms in the African savanna, where humans evolved.

Next question.

I didn't say 'magic mushrooms', you did (and McKenna, I guess - didn't read his stuff 'cause it is nonsense). I said 'psychoactives'. There are scads of them. Even digitalin, which has only a small dose interval between getting high and getting dead.

The observation that other apes are not interested in getting high only shows that any such trait would have arisen after the split between Pan and Homo. That still leaves 2 or 3 million years for it to arise.

Really, this is an insignificant detail. The most you can show with the magic mushroom argument is that the source of psychoactive drug is an unknown.

The stoned ape hypothesis is dead in the water unless its proponents can show a mechanism by which mind expanding drugs can produce genetic changes. That is it's Achilles heel. That's why those who argue for it lead you down the garden path arguing about magic mushrooms. Pages and pages of irrelevancy.

. . . with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own because he has commented on the idea of another . . . - Alexandre Dumas 'The Count of Monte Cristo"

There is no statement so absurd that it has not been uttered by some philosopher. - Cicero

OlegTheBatty wrote: I didn't say 'magic mushrooms', you did (and McKenna, I guess I didn't read his stuff 'cause it is nonsense). I said 'psychoactives'.

This is what Zeuzzz does. The Stoned ape theory is about magic mushrooms in the African savanna. It is not about other psychoactive drugs, in other places, where hominids didn't evolve, as that wouldn't be the claim made in this thread.

OlegTheBatty wrote: The stoned ape hypothesis is dead in the water unless its proponents can show a mechanism by which mind expanding drugs can produce genetic changes. That is it's Achilles heel. That's why those who argue for it lead you down the garden path arguing about magic mushrooms. Pages and pages of irrelevancy.

I won't torture you by asking you to read through the thread. However Zeuzzz had already withdrawn his Stoned Ape claim, for exactly the reasons you have stated. It took me two months to get Zeuzzz to admit that there is such mechanism. Zeuzzz has promised for a year to resubmit his "Stoned Ape Theory II" as a proper scientific paper.

All that happened recently, was that Zeuzz started slipping backwards and was re-entering the delusional framework that McKenna fabricated. Zeuzzz was starting to say again, that magic mushrooms caused modern humans to evolve,

2001 mushroom monolith.jpg

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Hey.I didn't read the entire thread but just the last few comments so sorry if i repeat or miss out.They are the Psychedelic Mushrooms if I'm not wrong. It increases the brain activity which made the hominoids better hunters. It also boosted their sex drive and engaged in group sex. This caused genetic diversification in the children which thus continued.I read it in a recent article.

Kyle_Connor wrote:Hey.I didn't read the entire thread but just the last few comments so sorry if i repeat or miss out.They are the Psychedelic Mushrooms if I'm not wrong. It increases the brain activity which made the hominoids better hunters.

There are plenty of studies which show that psychedelics interfere with practical skills, but none which demonstrate enhanced ability. "Oh, wow man! Groovy!" is not the best response to being chased by a lion.

It also boosted their sex drive and engaged in group sex. This caused genetic diversification in the children which thus continued.I read it in a recent article.

Only one sperm cell can fertilize an ovum. It does not matter how many partners she has.Whether protohumans were more or less monogamous or polygamous, a troop has a limited gene pool. Where was this genetic diversification coming from? Baboons?

. . . with the satisfied air of a man who thinks he has an idea of his own because he has commented on the idea of another . . . - Alexandre Dumas 'The Count of Monte Cristo"

There is no statement so absurd that it has not been uttered by some philosopher. - Cicero

zeuzzz wrote: There are two ways in which the term epigenetics can be defined.

Zeuzzz. We have been through this before. All epigenetic sequences are already evolved and carried in existing DNA. Epigentic sequences can not create one new gene. This confused you and Sweetpea for an entire year.

1) Epigenetic sequences are already evolved and carried in our existing DNA. They cannot introduce one new gene. Your insane claim was that they , magically triggered by magic mushrooms, introduced all the new genes to allow man to evolve.

2) You have been totally unable to explain any mechanism for how your Stoned ape theory introduced new genes to allow man to evolve, and you are still confused and claim that the hypothalamus-adrenal endocrine system somehow magically creates new gene information, using simple hormones that don't carry any DNA.

How's that scientific paper "Stoned Ape II" of yours coming Zeuzzz? Will you be finished next week or the week after?

zeuzzz wrote: It is in effect Lamarckism, but the recent emerging and extremely successful field of epigenetics adds far more plausibility to this idea than was previously allowed by such materialistic genetic determinism ideologies as you just stated. effectively epigenetics allows for the input of consciousness into inheritance

Please ignore Matt. He's being all weird again, and is stuck on strawmanning my arguments.

Lets see: "Epigentic sequences can not create one new gene." I never claimed that, epigenetics changes simply change gene expression. And you can't prove I said otherwise.

"that you ran away from, with full citations" The funniest thing about this quote (for me) is that the person who was supplying the most references in the debate thread was actually me, until it was shut down, for other reasons. I did actually answer all those questions in a thread I specifically started on this forum for anyone to vent anything about me they disagreed with here. That was not a complete answer, as the theory as it stands needs to be re-written from top to bottom. I am getting help from people on many inderdisciplinary fora, and it's mroe complex than most of the things we have talked about here yet. Many factors I have found out falsify McKennas theory as he wrote it in fact.

"Your insane claim was that they , magically triggered by magic mushrooms, introduced all the new genes to allow man to evolve. " This is not even funny, as it is an outright lie, the search function is top left Matt. Back this up. Or shut up. when I say consciousness can feed back into inheritance I simply mean in terms of the choices people make during their lifetimes, which could be their diet, could be their forced environmental diet; it could be many things, such as the studies in Sweden, that I backed up with evidence, and you further strawmanned. I copied it onto my blog, which was a culmulative condensation of various texts online about on epigenetics, where you read it and ridiculued it; the quote is actually from a BBC Article.

"In a remote town in northern Sweden there is evidence for this radical idea. Lying in Överkalix's parish registries of births and deaths and its detailed harvest records is a secret that confounds traditional scientific thinking. Marcus Pembrey, a Professor of Clinical Genetics at the Institute of Child Health in London, in collaboration with Swedish researcher Lars Olov Bygren, has found evidence in these records of an environmental effect being passed down the generations. They have shown that a famine at critical times in the lives of the grandparents can affect the life expectancy of the grandchildren. This is the first evidence that an environmental effect can be inherited in humans."

I also referenced in the main article the PTSD inherited from one generation to the next documented in the literature after the 9/11 attacks in reference to epigenetic inheritance, as this is one of the best modern examples we have in the scientific literature, and there is a clear and noticeable effect.

"You have been totally unable to explain any mechanism for how your Stoned ape theory introduced new genes to allow man to evolve" again with this now tormentedly long and drawn out genetic determism viewpoint you have. I have many times given you the example of Robert Sapolskys work with Baboons, to show that within just one generation drastic changes to a species behaviour are possible in spite of the genetics or additions to the gene pool.

I have done far more than this, in reality, if you truthfully reflect on all the previous posts in this thread. Don't pretend you have forgotten. As I can bring them up again.

Last edited by zeuzzz on Sun Jun 26, 2016 12:04 am, edited 1 time in total.

I am just wondering where you get the notion that genetics/epigenetics destroys the theory that agents that can drastically effect cognition, behaviours and perspective could not have effected the evolutionary trajectory of a species.

We see this in other animals as they settle into their various ecological niches, from the environmental effect of general diets effects on metabolism and neurochemistry, right down the spectrum to reindeer munching full blown psychedelic Amanita Muscaria and cats using catnip; why not humans in the distant prehistoric past too? Without going into the complexities of timescales and population bottlenecks ...

Or as you put it, and ended with a question mark, that I would like resolved; "Why genetics/epigenetics destroys your theory?"

Well why so?

Last edited by zeuzzz on Sun Jun 26, 2016 12:11 am, edited 1 time in total.

Notice how you have pretty much dodged all the substance in my above post and again hidden behind your own claims of my insanity and your usual accompanying emoticons. This behavior pattern is getting very tired, you seem stuck in past posting history instead of being open to progressing discussion of this subject into the future.

Please address some of the substance of my above post. Maybe that way this can become a bit more productive.

Last edited by zeuzzz on Sun Jun 26, 2016 12:23 am, edited 1 time in total.

I wrote quite a lot above Matt to explain myself; it would not be too hard to reply to some of it without Ad Hom accustions of deusions of insanity. I really would like to have a reasonable discussion here before the article is finished. Other forums seem to be able to manage it.

Well if we are keeping with a mushroom centric perspective on changes in consciousness leading to changes in behaviour and culture that can be inherited between generations mushrooms have a distinct fingerprint once gastronomy is at a sufficient evolutionary level.

At the threshold effect (micro-dosing level) of ingesting just 1-2mg/70kg of psilocybin a number of things are noted:

* Increase in abstract thought and tangential thinking outside the realms of ordinary metabolic reality* CNS stimulation in terms of a broadening in perceptive scope, noticing things in the immediate environment that are not usually noticed* Increase in tactile senses, colors are enhanced, visual accuity in terms of edge detection is increased, as the contrast between the now more vibrant colors seems more distinct* Due to increase in CNS stimulation this can act as a mild aphrodisiac, leading to more offspring* There are many more reported effects at this dosage level but since the dose is so small many of the effects are difficult to control vs placebo due to other variables effecting the results, I could list some thirty more ...

At the 3-10mg/70kg level there are new phenomenon and an increase in the above

* A breaking of ordinary behavioural patterns so completely new and novel behaviours and cognitive effects become evident* A more psychologically introspective state is reached, called by psychopharmacologists meta-cognition (ie, thinking about thinking). This is the state that seems to cure people that have OCD ailments, as they are able to 'pull back' from their usual habitual behaviours and see how unproductive they are.* Feelings (both positive and negative) are enhanced due to this change in meta-cognition* Incessant laughter and bonding is very common at these low levels, with traits similar to those of enactogenic agents* Creativity is enhanced as the normal mental modality of thought previously constrained by metabolism is pushed more to the abstract realm* A loss of self identity (a diminishing of the ego) starts to happen, so social constructs built up by culture start to dissolve and people feel more free, the personality metric used by Griffiths et al in his studies is an 'increase in personality domain of open-ness'

At the 10mg-20mg/70kg level

* Visual hallucinations and a blurring of the immediate environment, to the point where things that are not there begin to be seen, only OEVs, but not CEVs (closed eye visuals)* The RSN (resting state network) state of mind is peturbed to the point that self identity is hard to conceptualize, leading to a greatly diminished ego and place in the hierarchy of the troop/culture* A synaesthetic state is reached, where all of the senses get melded together and can interplay and manifest in new novel ways, often experienced as a logos like voice in the head* Emotions and introspection into ones mental modality and psyche are greatly enhanced, and less focussed on the local environment and more on ones internal state of mind and how this has effected ones behaviours in the past in relation to other people (ie, mirror neuron activity is greatly enhanced)* A catalysis of consciousness in terms of new ideas, thoughts, insights and feelings; as previously neurologically compartmentalized areas of the brain are shut down due to previously separate areas forming new connections with each other* At these dosage levels fMRI scans have shown definate decreases in cerebral blood-flow (CBF) in the posterior cingulate cortex, which acts mainly as a kind of central hub where all most cognitive day to day thoughts and input is filtered through, and is the main difference in neuroscience that distinguishes us from primates, as this region displays very high ontogenetic development with time as the brain develops, and is also significantly larger in humans than in primates, with higher density of connections to the rest of the brain

At the 20-40mg/70kg level

* Visual hallucinations and a blurring of the immediate environment become over-powering, communication is out of the question, OEVs are intense and CEVs are even more intense, and referred to in the literature as either mystical or visionary states, with eyes either open or shut* The RSN is peturbed to the point where self identity is replaced by a feeling of 'one-ness', not just with fellow members of the troop/culture but with the local environment and nature itself* These intense states are accompanied by fractal visions, and can be accompanied by states of psychological struggle as people wrestle with the loss of their ego and self identity* The imagination begins to manifest more than external reality and the local environment, leading to a state of synaesthetic creativity that meld all senses into one* Either the subject starts to panic at the profundity of the experience, with a peak in adrenalin to slowly wear off as the psilocin is metabolized, or they can relax into the experience and come out of it transformed and with a new perspective of the self, their environment, their culture/troop and their place in it. Some 80% of humans who reach this state (from the John Hopkins research) report it to be one of the most spiritually significant happenings of their lives, on a par with giving birth, falling in love for the first time or experiencing the death of a loved one.

Dosages up to ten times that (200-400mg/70kg) are even stronger, but never fatal (maybe for people with pre-existing heart conditions). It takes over one hundred to one thousand times that doseage to start to cause enough physiological stress on the body to cause an overdose based death (see the LD50 discussed on the first page of this thread by me), though of course psycholgical confusion could lead to dangerous behaviour.

I have rushed this list, but since we know that a single one off event (the world trade center attacks on 9/11) had a noticeable effect on the next generations inheritance of PTSD via epigenetic changes to gene expression, similarly with people studied in Sweden during the famines metabolism of their food; to suggest that such profound experiences would not have had a similarly long lasting effect on gene expression would be the more ridiuculous position to take. The effects would have been more than genetic too, but psycho-social and cultural; lets not get bogged down with a gene centric perspective of this.

If you want to bring up the plausability of continual use, or the cultural use, or the ambience of effect single users would have amoungst a disparate population over long periods of time, we can talk about that. Also the repeatability of use is an important variable, along with dietary considerations and the environmental impact factors leading to such a diet.

Most importantly we can start to weigh some positive and negative evolutionarily selective advantages from the above rough profile I have sketched, and compare what factors they catalyze or diminish vs primates and modern humans in terms of psychology and cognitive functions. As each point goes a lot deeper than I have just laid out.

zeuzzz wrote:Well if we are keeping with a mushroom centric perspective on changes in consciousness leading to changes in behaviour and culture that can be inherited between generations mushrooms have a distinct fingerprint once gastronomy is at a sufficient evolutionary level.

At the threshold effect (micro-dosing level) of ingesting just 1-2mg/70kg of psilocybin a number of things are noted:

* Increase in abstract thought and tangential thinking outside the realms of ordinary metabolic reality* CNS stimulation in terms of a broadening in perceptive scope, noticing things in the immediate environment that are not usually noticed* Increase in tactile senses, colors are enhanced, visual accuity in terms of edge detection is increased, as the contrast between the now more vibrant colors seems more distinct* Due to increase in CNS stimulation this can act as a mild aphrodisiac, leading to more offspring* There are many more reported effects at this dosage level but since the dose is so small many of the effects are difficult to control vs placebo due to other variables effecting the results, I could list some thirty more ...

At the 3-10mg/70kg level there are new phenomenon and an increase in the above

* A breaking of ordinary behavioural patterns so completely new and novel behaviours and cognitive effects become evident* A more psychologically introspective state is reached, called by psychopharmacologists meta-cognition (ie, thinking about thinking). This is the state that seems to cure people that have OCD ailments, as they are able to 'pull back' from their usual habitual behaviours and see how unproductive they are.* Feelings (both positive and negative) are enhanced due to this change in meta-cognition* Incessant laughter and bonding is very common at these low levels, with traits similar to those of enactogenic agents* Creativity is enhanced as the normal mental modality of thought previously constrained by metabolism is pushed more to the abstract realm* A loss of self identity (a diminishing of the ego) starts to happen, so social constructs built up by culture start to dissolve and people feel more free, the personality metric used by Griffiths et al in his studies is an 'increase in personality domain of open-ness'

At the 10mg-20mg/70kg level

* Visual hallucinations and a blurring of the immediate environment, to the point where things that are not there begin to be seen, only OEVs, but not CEVs (closed eye visuals)* The RSN (resting state network) state of mind is peturbed to the point that self identity is hard to conceptualize, leading to a greatly diminished ego and place in the hierarchy of the troop/culture* A synaesthetic state is reached, where all of the senses get melded together and can interplay and manifest in new novel ways, often experienced as a logos like voice in the head* Emotions and introspection into ones mental modality and psyche are greatly enhanced, and less focussed on the local environment and more on ones internal state of mind and how this has effected ones behaviours in the past in relation to other people (ie, mirror neuron activity is greatly enhanced)* A catalysis of consciousness in terms of new ideas, thoughts, insights and feelings; as previously neurologically compartmentalized areas of the brain are shut down due to previously separate areas forming new connections with each other* At these dosage levels fMRI scans have shown definate decreases in cerebral blood-flow (CBF) in the posterior cingulate cortex, which acts mainly as a kind of central hub where all most cognitive day to day thoughts and input is filtered through, and is the main difference in neuroscience that distinguishes us from primates, as this region displays very high ontogenetic development with time as the brain develops, and is also significantly larger in humans than in primates, with higher density of connections to the rest of the brain

At the 20-40mg/70kg level

* Visual hallucinations and a blurring of the immediate environment become over-powering, communication is out of the question, OEVs are intense and CEVs are even more intense, and referred to in the literature as either mystical or visionary states, with eyes either open or shut* The RSN is peturbed to the point where self identity is replaced by a feeling of 'one-ness', not just with fellow members of the troop/culture but with the local environment and nature itself* These intense states are accompanied by fractal visions, and can be accompanied by states of psychological struggle as people wrestle with the loss of their ego and self identity* The imagination begins to manifest more than external reality and the local environment, leading to a state of synaesthetic creativity that meld all senses into one* Either the subject starts to panic at the profundity of the experience, with a peak in adrenalin to slowly wear off as the psilocin is metabolized, or they can relax into the experience and come out of it transformed and with a new perspective of the self, their environment, their culture/troop and their place in it. Some 80% of humans who reach this state (from the John Hopkins research) report it to be one of the most spiritually significant happenings of their lives, on a par with giving birth, falling in love for the first time or experiencing the death of a loved one.

Dosages up to ten times that (200-400mg/70kg) are even stronger, but never fatal (maybe for people with pre-existing heart conditions). It takes over one hundred to one thousand times that doseage to start to cause enough physiological stress on the body to cause an overdose based death (see the LD50 discussed on the first page of this thread by me), though of course psycholgical confusion could lead to dangerous behaviour.

I have rushed this list...

So it seems. I cannot find any of what is described above at the provided link to gizmag.